Evidence for ancient antibiotics

A chemist, a doctor, and two anthropologists walk into a bar. Mark Nelson, Andrew Dinardo, Jeffery Hochberg, and George Armelagos discovered that had they been Ancient Nubians, their beer would have contained antibiotics. This would have been nearly two thousand years before the "first" discovery of the antibiotic penicillin by Alexander Fleming which won him his Nobel Prize. Using acid extraction and mass spectroscopic characterization, they investigated reports on bones that when test with UV light produced yellow-green fluorophore deposition bands indicative of tetracycline. They rejected the claims that the exposure was postmortem and proposed the contents had been ingested over a long period of time. According to Nelson, this ancient population did not accidentally mass produce the antibiotic. It is believed that the nutrition and pharmacological effects of the fermentation was purposefully done.

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